| NSF Org: |
EAR Division Of Earth Sciences |
| Recipient: |
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| Initial Amendment Date: | January 9, 2017 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | March 8, 2019 |
| Award Number: | 1550855 |
| Award Instrument: | Continuing Grant |
| Program Manager: |
Raleigh Martin
ramartin@nsf.gov (703)292-7199 EAR Division Of Earth Sciences GEO Directorate for Geosciences |
| Start Date: | January 15, 2017 |
| End Date: | December 31, 2019 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $162,778.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $162,778.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
FY 2018 = $80,293.00 FY 2019 = $38,806.00 |
| History of Investigator: |
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| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
21 N PARK ST STE 6301 MADISON WI US 53715-1218 (608)262-3822 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
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| Primary Place of Performance: |
WI US 53715-1218 |
| Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
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| Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
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| Parent UEI: |
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| NSF Program(s): | GEOINFORMATICS |
| Primary Program Source: |
01001819DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT 01001920DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT |
| Program Reference Code(s): | |
| Program Element Code(s): |
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| Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.050 |
ABSTRACT
This project will continue to develop a mobile app, Flyover Country (FC), that will bring information about relevant points of interest (POI) and map data to the user while flying, and also driving or hiking, without the need for in-flight Wi-Fi, by downloading a strip of data based on the flightpath before the user boards the plane. GPS (Global Positioning System), which functions in airplane mode, allows precise flight tracking, making prompts for POI viewing timely and relevant. With around 4.5 million people flying every day, the potential audience for FC is huge, as is its potential for geoscience outreach. The app will directly feed high-quality geoscience information to the user at the very point when curiosity is stimulated, and could thus improve public science literacy as well as inspiring and supporting the development of a generation of geoscientists. FC could also readily be adapted for use in STEM education, and will be structured so as to provide a platform for the exposure of all types of geospatial geoscience data, forming new infrastructure for education and research.
Flyover Country (FC) is an open-source Android and iOS mobile application for geoscience outreach and education. Its key features are (1) delimitation of an area of interest to a traveler (e.g., a flight path, driving route, or hiking trail); (2) selection of georeferenced data within the delimited area via API calls to data repositories; (3) caching of these datasets on the user?s smartphone local storage; (4) exposure and promotion of points of interest (POI) by a location-aware service as the user approaches the POI. Work proposed here extends FC?s functionality to the geoscience research community as a data discovery tool that can be readily used in the field to instantly and dynamically provide context to new measurements. Novel visualization strategies for stratigraphic and multivariate data, as well as authorship and provenance networks, will further enhance researcher efficiency.
PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH
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PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT
Disclaimer
This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.
The Flyover Country (FC) project serves information about fossil records, natural points of interest, and rock types, among other things, to the public through a mobile application (http://flyovercountry.io). Although many services exist within the geosciences to serve data to researchers, including the Neotoma Paleoecology Database’s Explorer (http://apps.neotomadb.org/explorer), these tend to be specialized platforms for researchers. Because the end-user is often a domain scientist, the visual representation of data and associated map services are secondary to the ability to discover and download data for research purposes.
The FC team from the University of Wisconsin--Madison has provided two new tools for representing research data for scientific and public consumption, the Author Network visualizer, and the Flyover Country Visualization Suite. In addition to these tools the team has undertaken a survey of researchers within the scientific community. The survey takes two forms: (1) a literature survey, to look at the ways in which researchers represent paleoecological data in the literature; and (2) a direct survey of practitioners asking both which types of figures they have used, but also which representations are the most useful to convey information about data.
Initial tool design resulted in the development of the Flyover Country Visualization Suite (FCVS: github.com/RossThorn/FCVS) and the Neotoma Author Network (github.com/NeotomaDB/AuthorNetwork; simongoring.shinyapps.io/authorNetwork). The surveys are part of publications in preparation (github.com/FCGI/ContentAnalysis), but work has been presented at a number of conferences and workshops.
The Author Network resulted in changes to the Neotoma Paleoecology Database (http://neotomadb.org). It highlighted the need to obscure personal data within the database (e.g., personal addresses), it led to the current migration push for the Neotoma Paleoecology Database, as multiple end users began working on both the database Application Program Interface (API) and the database itself. In addition the Author Network provided an opportunity to geocode text addresses in the database, which supports more extensive use of geospatial tools with the Neotoma Paleoecology Database itself.
Development of the FCVS allows users to generate a number of web-native data visualizations for paleoecological data, such as fossil pollen data. This can lead to cleaner visualizations of data that is represented by multiple variables simultaneously. For example, forest cover in the upper Midwestern United States may be represented by the relative proportions of pine (*Pinus*), oak (*Quercus*), grass (Poaceae) and poplar (*Populus*) pollen. Any single pollen type would not be able to represent the complexity of this natural ecotone. The FCVS can represent multiple variables simultaneously within a web-mapping context, and as such represents a major contribution to our capacity to visualize and synthesize spatial data.
Broader outcomes of this grant include the publication and dissemination of a short open access article and longer open access pre-print on accessibility in the sciences (https://doi.org/10.1002/fee.1771). This work comes as a result of considering the broader implications of developing new tools to present complex data to users on web-based platforms, and working with interdisciplinary collaborators to consider the needs of individuals with sensory disabilities. The paper is in the top 5% for all research outputs with an Altmetric score.
Goring, Simon; C. Grimm, Eric; Blois, Jessica L.; Williams, Jack W.; W. Graham, Russell; Roth, Robert; et al. (2017): The Neotoma Database: Recent developments and future directions. figshare. Presentation. DOI: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.5293882.v1
Roth, R., Thorn, R., Goring S.J., Loeffler, S., Myrbo, A., Williams, J. 2019. Multivariate and Spatiotemporal Visualization for Ecological Informatics: A Quantitative Content Analysis of Visualization Practices using the Neotoma Paleoecology Database. AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts. URL: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2019AGUFMIN21B..20R
Goring SJ, Whitney KS, Jacob A. 2018. Accessibility is imperative for inclusion. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. 16: 63. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/fee.1771
Last Modified: 07/03/2020
Modified by: Simon Goring
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